News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Church league softball is in full swing, we're enjoying the first fruits of our garden, and there are many yard and house projects. Summer is beginning to round into form.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Seamus Heaney, the Oakland Ballers, and frugality.
- Teddy Macker probes the deeper questions raised by the MAHA movement: "What exactly is health? What do we mean by that word? What is a proper understanding of it?"
- Jon Schaff turns to Walker Percy for wisdom about how we understand our selves: "We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom."
- David Bannon looks at the context in which Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was written and received: "Two earlier novels were dismal affairs that would make him wince in later years. But now in 1927, over the course of a few months (perhaps as quickly as five weeks), he fills each page with pain and sorrow."
- Lorelei Oomens describes how narcissists see the world and considers what help they may need: "A person who’s overly paranoid about the attention of strangers cannot be helped with gentle words of reassurance. You can’t coo overly saccharine compliments at them and expect that their fears will vanish."
- Frank Filocomo reports on a group working to encourage reading and community: "One group, Reading Rhythms, founded in 2023, is bringing people together through the power of reading. . . . Though admittedly dubious at first (how, I thought, could reading, a decisively solitary activity, bring about social connection?), I was delightfully surprised by what I found: an enthusiastic bunch of young people, books in hand, ready to meet new friends."
- Holly Stockley considers the multi-faceted nature of a long-worsening water shortage: "In quiet Ottawa County, Michigan, a water crisis is not merely brewing—it is already here."
John Searle’s Minds, Brains and Science began as a series of radio lectures, and the printed book still retains the straightforward clarity of oral address. It’s probably most famous for Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, but it’s full of sharply stated insights into consciousness and the underpinnings of social science. For instance:
Suppose no one knew how clocks worked. Suppose it was frightfully difficult to figure out how they worked, because, though there were plenty around, no one knew how to build one, and efforts to figure out how they worked tended to destroy the clock. Now suppose a group of researchers said, ‘We will understand how clocks work if we design a machine that is functionally the equivalent of a clock, that keeps time just as well as a clock.’ So they designed an hour glass and claimed: ‘Now we understand how clocks work,’ or perhaps: ‘If only we could get the hour glass to be just as accurate as a clock we would at last understand how clocks work.’ Substitute ‘brain’ for ‘clock’ in this parable, and substitute ‘digital computer program’ for ‘hour glass’ and the notion of intelligence for the notion of keeping time and you have the contemporary situation in much (not all!) of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro